Friday, January 23, 2015

We are thrilled and honored to be one of the bloggers participating in the second annual Multicultural Children’s Book Day. This paw-some day is the brainchild of co-creators Mia Wenjen from Pragmatic Mom, and Valarie Budayr from Jump Into a Book/Audrey Press. These two paw-riffic children's reading and play advocates created this much needed event as a way to draw attention and raise awareness about diversity in children’s literature. It has been exciting to see the growth of this special day in only one year's time.Congratulations, Mia & Valarie!

Our mission is to not only raise awareness for the kid’s books that celebrate diversity, but to get more of these of books into classrooms and libraries.

Mission: Despite census data that shows 37% of the US population consists of people of color, only 10% of children’s books published have diversity content. Using the Multicultural Children’s Book Day, Mia and Valarie are on a mission to change all of that. Their mission is to not only raise awareness for the kid’s books that celebrate diversity, but to get more of these types of books into classrooms and libraries. Another goal of this exciting event is create a compilation of books and favorite reads that will provide not only a new reading list for the winter, but also a way to expose brilliant books to families, teachers, and libraries.

“MCCBD team hopes to spread the word and raise awareness about the importance of diversity in children’s literature. Our young readers need to see themselves within the pages of a book and experience other cultures, languages, traditions and religions within the pages of a book. We encourage readers, parents, teachers, caregivers and librarians to follow along the fun book reviews, author visits, event details, a multicultural children’s book linky and via our hashtag (#ReadYourWorld) on Twitter and other social media.”

CoHosts:

First Book

MCCBD is partnering with First Book to offer a Virtual Book Drive that will help donate multicultural children’s books through their channels during the week of the event. We want to help get diversity books into the hands of kids who most need it and now we have a way to do it! The Virtual Book Drive is LIVE and can be found HERE.

Children’s Book Council

MCCBD is also collaborating with Children’s Book Council to highlight wonderful diversity books and authors on an ongoing basis all year.

Our Review

The first thing we want to do is thank Chronicle Books for sponsoring this fantastic event and for sending us a review copy of Lowriders in Space.

Pages: 112 Age Level: Amazon says 8-12 years old. We believe the younger side of the age range is better suited for this book.

Summary (Amazon): Lupe Impala, El Chavo Flapjack, and Elirio Malaria love working with cars. You name it, they can fix it. But the team's favorite cars of all are lowriders—cars that hip and hop, dip and drop, go low and slow,bajito y suavecito. ...Read more on Amazon.

The Book's Trailer

Our Thoughts

This was a tough review for us. Our normal policy is not to review books that we don't love. Why? Well, we aren't professional reviewers, and there are so many GREAT books out there that we find those should be our focus. You probably see where we are headed...we did not love this book.

If we didn't have to give the book an extra chance, we would have stopped reading on the first page. The change in perspective of the illustrations made it difficult to tell who was who and made us have to put too much thought into the opening pages of a book. Lose us on page one, and we won't be around for page two.

We wanted to LOVE it. We were hopeful. The main character is a female car mechanic, after all - how cool is that? However, as much as we tried to love it, we weren't successful.

There were inconsistencies in the book that drove us nuts. One example is the order of objects that the characters came upon in our Solar System: Pluto...the Moon...Jupiter? We decided they must be ping-ponging through the solar system (?).

Activities

Disclosure: We received a copy of Low Riders in Space from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. We received no monetary or in-kind compensation for our honest review. This post does NOT contain affiliate links. We will be donating this book to our local library.

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